Shirō Toyoda’s The Mistress is based on Mori Ogai’s Romantic novelWild Geese (and sometimes referred to by the title of the original, as Criterion does). The film is in some ways a familiar melodramatic narrative about the crushing of a woman’s desire under patriarchy — a treatment dismissively summarized in 1959 by Bosley Crowther of The New York Times as “a morally mawkish situation upon a tear-misted screen.” But this (ironically patriarchal) scorn misses so much of the film’s nuance and historical context, not to mention the beauty of its images.

Sunrise is an undisputed masterpiece of the silent era’s final days, a staggering set of technical achievements in service to melodramatic fairy-tale pathos. It’s also the story of how sometimes the only thing needed to put the spark back in an empty marriage is a little bit of attempted murder.

Framed as a rejection of the worrying, internet-age tendency to demand narratives that suit audience expectations — not to mention the even more worrying impulse to attack and threaten artists personally for failing to deliver the pre-fab stories some audience members crave to a frightening and pathetic degree — Rosenberg’s piece is reasonable enough.